The prior art has recognized the fact that, when seed cotton modules are delivered to a gin, they are, at times, stored on the ground or on a slab so that the lower portions of the modules become wet and impregnated with debris, such as dirt, sand, mud, trash and other accumulated particles of foreign matter. It is common for the modules to have been stored out-of-doors on the slabs or on the ground or in fields, prior to the time they are transported to the gin. As a result of such storage, the modules have the debris retained by the fibers along and adjacent to the bottom surface of the module. Such contaminated modules, when fed directly into the feeder head, may damage the cutters of the feeder head and the debris may be passed, with the cotton clumps, along ducts where the sand or other particles abrade the elbows and fan of the duct.
In the past, efforts have been made to slice a bottom portion of the module from the remaining module as or prior to its being disintegrated by the feeder head.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,121,841 issued Jun. 16, 1992 to Harrington, et al., for example, discloses a method and apparatus for separating the more contaminated bottom portion of the feed seed cotton modules from the upper portion. In this patent, a process is described for slicing the bottom portion of the module body away from the remainder of the body, as the main portion of the body is reduced to small clumps of cotton at the feeder head. In this prior art system, the bottom portion, which has been sliced away from the remainder of the module, is fed along a separate path, away from the cotton clumps and the removed cotton is discarded.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,222,675, issued Jun. 29, 1975 to Stover, addresses the problem by providing an arrangement, upstream from the feeder head, which shaves the bottom portion of the module to remove a part of the bottom portion which contains the wet and/or dirty cotton. Both of these prior art apparatuses remove a substantial part of the bottom portion of the cotton module from the upper portion of the module or from the cotton clumps derived from the module. Waste cotton from the Stover process is conveyed away from the remainder of the cotton or cotton clumps of the module.